BOOKS The Bitter Truth conclusion was redched that anyone who proposed himself to the American people as a Fascist would have no chance of success; he would have to come forward as a defender of democracy. The book, written in the thirties, made an aston- ishingly accurate forecast of the pattern of the attack during the last decade on the liberals, and on the Bil] of Rights, conducted in the name of Americanism bv the McCarthyites and bv more pow- erful and more enduring groups. But beneath the brilliant study of Fascist technique there was an insecure founda- tion-the belief that if people were given a fair share of the world's goods, leisure, and security, they would become immune to the blandishments of propa- gandists wIth corrupt motives. Thi illusion appedrs to have been the product of Silone's close engagement in the struggle, which must have appeared an almost impossible one, against Musso- lini's regime. The chances of victory, in the years of Fascist success, were so remote that it was perhaps necessary to nourish extravagant hopes in order to make it possible to continue the fight. Be that as it may, all was not c;;weetness and light after the regime collapsed; when the debris of Fascism was removed from the scent:, it was obvious that very little had changed. All the primitive " T HE SECRET OF Lo CA" (Harper) is a strong and beautiful novel by Ignazio Silone, the author of "Fon- , ' tamara" and of that brilliant analysis of both the European and the American forms of Fascism called "The School for Dictators." "F ontamara," it will be recalled, was the terse tragicomedy of the eXploitation of the brutal necessities weighing on an Italian village by career- ist politician , who promIsed the conta- dini a new world and ended by stealIng even their water supply for the benefit of a neIghboring landowner. It was a materialist fable, which represented that the character of village life is shaped and controlled by hunger and need- hunger for food and for land to grow It on and for water to irrigate the land, need for shelter and for fuel. The im- plication was that If the landowner were to let the people of F on tamara have theIr fair share of this land and the water that went with it, and if the politicians were to become sincere and to offer less and accomplish more, the village would be a changed place, inhabited by a gentle and kindly people. "The School for Dictators" had a similar theme, or at least a similar underlying belief in human reasonableness. I t took the form of a series of conversatIons between an American politicIan who had come to Europe to learn the secrets of brInging a FascIst party in to pow- er, his adviser, and a European studen t of their techniques. Silone described the sort of lies with which the FascIsts had succeeded in Italy and Germany, and the sort that had failed them elsewhere. The recipe for success, he pOInted out, was the de- tection of the areas of unreason in the mass mind in which prej- udice and shibboleth would produce auto- matic responses, and a constant and clamorous harping on certain ideas after those areas were found At the end of the conversations, the + p + 1/ . +. 4 153 fears and greeds that enslave men in theIr brutishness operated as powerfully as ever, and the struggle for a world ruled by gentleness and kindliness seemed as hopeless as ever. The liher- ated were less eager to en joy their re- gained liherties than to pav off old scores, and it became apparent that these old SCoreS related to deeper enmitIes and rivalries than those that could be gen- erated by politics. Could it be that Fascism was not a force that generated cruelty and in justice, and that per- verted men, but was merely a device for capturing the wild horses in the human heart and harnessing them to a political machine? Behind that question lay sleeping the larger ones that are the issue between Romanticism and Classi- cism. Is man a naturally good beIng, dwarfed and deformed by social in- justice, who needs only freedom to show himself at hIs best? Or is he an in- herently vile one, who can be coerced into the paths of virtue and decency only by organizations powerful enough to comhat his instinctive preference for disorder and confusion? Silone, a Romantic at the outset, was shaken by the collapse of the Fascist straw tiger; it brought him-or the ldeal man of good will in his imagination- up agaInst the profound hostility of ordi- -- "I would never make a ballplayer My lowest point of efficiency is right in the mzddle of the afternoon"